I think it’s time to face facts about this whole “internet” thing.
America, as it exists, was not set up to deal with it. And now our Democracy is failing, and surely looks like it’s going to be replaced by an oligarchy. With the most recent muscling of the Washington Post into silence being an excellent example.
To be clear, the internet revolution:
1: Has largely turned journalism into a charity. What’s left of journalism. In the case of the Post, it’s a private charity. But in no sense does the Post make enough money to survive on its own. Particularly, with the current incompetent management.
2: Has made it almost unimaginably easier and cheaper to spread lies and rumors.
3: Has spawned entire professional classes whose job it is create attractive disinformation. So it’s not just random lies and rumors, it’s stuff carefully crafted to be “sticky”. It’s material developed with considerable expertise, professionally designed to attract and mislead.
4: Has allowed the crazy to cluster and self-reinforce. With the help of Jewish space lasers, and Q, and weather control, and … the list seems almost endless, in hindsight.
5: Reinforces a winner-take-all economy. Ebay, Amazon, Facebook, and similar are essentially natural monopolies, like electricity. Just unregulated The result is an economic and societal landscape dominated by oligarchs, with a concentration of wealth that would have been unimaginable in (say) the post WWII era when America dominated the globe.
6: Requires a huge Federal budget deficit to support the extreme concentration of income in few hands. Because the rich have such a low marginal propensity to consume (that is, they spend only a sliver of their income), somebody has to borrow and spent a ton of money every year, or the large net savings of the rich would tank the economy. (They put the money in the bank, somebody else has to take it out of the bank, or there’s not enough spending to support current income.) Thus, we’re on an unavoidable path toward bankruptcy, as a country, because the large annual Federal deficit is needed to offset the annual net savings of our collective super-rich, to whom an increasing share of GDP flows.
Or maybe we just like spending money.
But having such a large share of the money, end up in so few hands, produces in the U.S. a political system driven by the desires of the oligarchs. The fact that the Supreme Court blessed having the rich buy elections (via Citizen’s United) isn’t really the root cause. It’s just another manifestation of the power of our domestic oligarchs.
Conclusion
People get it wrong, mostly, when they brand Trump a fascist. Not that his well-documented admiration for Hitler doesn’t put him in that class. And sure, attacking the news media, promoting a rabidly racist world-view, antisemitism, blaming all our problems on “the enemy within”, those are all straight out of the Mein Kampf playbook.
Hitlererian strategy, minus the Lebensraum. That pretty much sums up what’s left of the Republican party, at the national level.
But he, like his idol Putin, is an oligarch. One of a set of super-rich people who want to run the show. The trappings of fascism are just there to attract the votes, mostly, I think. Though the racism seems bred to the bone.
And, one way or the other, he has the cooperation of most all the other oligarchs. Those that aren’t completely on board, he seems to be able to co-opt, or threaten into submission. And so, because journalism is a charity these days, and the Post exists at the whim of its oligarch-patron, if that patron bends the knee in order not to have its lucrative government space contract threatened, then so does the now-all-but-irrelevant Washington Post. Because, at root, oligarchs wouldn’t have become oligarchs if they hadn’t had the same central preoccupation — having as much wealth as they possibly can. So, effectively, once they’ve divided up the pie, they’re all on the same side.
And so, America is in transition to becoming one of the best countries that highly-concentrated-wealth can buy.
I still wonder about how those West Virginia coal miners feel about all the help that Trump never gave them. I’d bet they’re still going to vote for him. And that’s about all you need to know, about what kind of a country we’re about to become.
In a world where Rule #4 applies — Yes, they can be that dumb — we simply lack the resiliency to adapt our Democracy to the internet. Let alone AI.
Our ultra-rich — with the help of the Supreme Court — have now taken advantage of the inability (or maybe unwillingness) of our populace to sort fact from fiction.
Think of it as evolution in action. We’ve created a world filled with spam, scams, and carefully-crafted lies. Our population isn’t up to the task of sorting that out. Even if it wanted to,
So we get the government we deserve.
(N.B., the title is from Oath of Fealty, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. You might recall Niven from the Ringworld series, if you’re an aging sci-fi fan.)
